Pixar is one of the few places I’d kill to work at. Their attention to creativity and extremely high product quality always blows my mind. I recently watched the opening of Up again and it is absolute perfection.
Pixar’s leadership knows that they have to put the creative process at the heart of their company – but also have to ensure it will survive long-after the original founders and staff have gone:
Pixar’s approach to creativity is striking for two reasons. The first is that the company puts people before projects. … Pixar starts by bringing in creative people and then encourages them to generate ideas. The second is that the company devotes a lot of effort to getting people to work together. In most companies, people collaborate on specific projects, but pay little attention to what’s going on elsewhere in the business. Pixar, however, tries to foster a sense of collective responsibility among its 1,200 staff. Employees show unfinished work to one another in daily meetings, so get used to giving and receiving constructive criticism. And a small “brain trust” of top executives reviews films in the works. … This system of constant feedback is designed to bring problems to the surface before they mutate into crises, and to provide creative teams with a source of inspiration. … Pixar also obliges its teams to conduct formal post mortems once their films are complete.
via The Economist
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